Posted
by
msmash
on Wednesday August 23, 2017 @03:45PM
from the it's-still-broken dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: One reason for this, if you live in Toronto like me (or anywhere else for that matter), is that there's basically nowhere to spend digital coins in the real world. Coinmap, a service that maps bitcoin-accepting locations all over the world, shows a few places that accept bitcoin in Toronto, but it's clearly out of date -- I called several businesses listed on the site and they had no idea what bitcoin even is. A bigger problem is perfectly illustrated in a Reddit post from Wednesday morning complaining that a bitcoin transaction worth just $9 still hasn't gone through the network after two days of waiting. Two. Days. The likely reason is that the fee attached to the transaction in order to incentivize faster confirmation -- 50 cents, which is about as much of a premium as I'd pay for a $9 transaction -- simply wasn't enough. "Should I have paid $3 on a $9 transfer to get it processed?" the person wrote.

The author has a good point, and I've always felt that the transaction fees were a big problem for bitcoin. Many of the people who are looking for an alternative form of payment are trying to get away from all the fees banks put on their money, but if you have to spend more than 5% in transaction fees to get your payment processed, have you really gained anything?

I like the concept behind crypto-currencies, but it's just not going to work if it's more expensive to use it than to use existing payment methods.

Blame the miners. Miners receive the transaction fees whenever they receive the block award. So, the miner have been trying their best to keep the fees as high as possible. They do this by creating several small transactions they basically send the coins to themselves creating a backlog. Part of this whole forking bitcoin is related to this.

Personally, I support Dash because they have very low fees 0.0001 Dash (=$0.03) for normal transactions and you can have ultra fast transactions with several confirmatio

I don't think the idea of block chain is inherently slow. Design choices that BTC have made and stuck to have kept it so.
I had a very little bit of bit coin, and trying to spend it was not easy.
You are also right that BTC is no longer being marketed as a currency, but as an investment. The currency side of things has been sidelined and forgotten.

It all depends on the systems you use. I have a debit card with a Visa logo. Anywhere they take Visa, I can use it to spend money. In this particular card's case, it withdraws bitcoin from my coinbase account when I use it. I pay the price in whatever currency the merchant is using. McDonalds gets USD from Visa. Visa gets USD from coinbase. Coinbase gets bitcoin from my wallet.

Basically, I can spend my bitcoin anywhere that takes Visa. Or, I can sell bitcoin and get USD deposited to my credit union account. As a bonus, I can send bitcoin to people or organizations. If I ever need to pay someone who doesn't have a bank account, or need to pay a (cheap, cause I don't have much) crypto malware ransom, I can do that with bitcoins or ethereum. In theory, I could buy things on a black market with my crypto-currency holdings, but honestly I haven't looked into it because I don't want to connect myself to that world.

That point becomes irrelevant very quickly when you realize that most people make far more transactions in the $9 range than the $9M range.

The whole point is that when using a currency of any form, you don't want to have to think about how the back end stuff works, you just want to pay for your item and be done, and with the minimum transaction fees, and minimum hassle.

That's why things like tap to pay work so well, they're easy. You don't have to think about how that whole thing works, it just does. And my credit card is free to use (actually it pays me a percentage of each transaction) (I know, I know, the merchant pays for it and passes that along to me in the form of higher prices, but as long as I don't get a discount for using a different payment method, it works out to the same thing and I'd be stupid not to use the credit card)

Now that's just talking about convenience and price. There's also the privacy argument, but that's a completely different one, and I'm not certain that bitcoin is anywhere near as "untraceable" as some people think.

I've seen a pretty apt description that bitcoin more resembles gold in this respect. Most gold coins are uncirculated because they spent their time in a bank and not jingling around in someone's pocket. So bitcoin doesn't really help much with small or micropayments.

(I know, I know, the merchant pays for it and passes that along to me in the form of higher prices, but as long as I don't get a discount for using a different payment method, it works out to the same thing and I'd be stupid not to use the credit card)

It only works out to the same thing in a shittier universe, in which the CC companies are rewarded for mandating perverse incentives to their own advantage.

Your credit card is not free for you. It just seems that way. The cost of handling credit card transactions, debit fees (Interac), and even the handling of cash are all included in the cost of goods that we buy. And cards that give you money back, or other such rewards, cost the retailer more to process. Even if you get charged for using your bank card the retailer still gets charged on their end too for their side of the transaction.

Seems like the inevitable is about to happen. Nobody want's to mine Bit Coin for what they pay anymore. Silly me, I thought that this wouldn't happen until all the coin was gone and they stopped issuing new ones, I was wrong by a long shot.

You can use Bitcoin person to person.Yes, Bitcoin (BTC) has been taken over by companies and individuals who hate the original anarchist idea of unstoppable decentralized cryptocurrencies.This takeover will centralize and have high fees and controls and you will lose.

I didn't really think or look into it too much, but I'm not sure I understand this whole bitcoin thing.I understand the technology behind it is very valuable to banking institutions; but what makes the bitcoin itself be worth (more?) than an ounce of gold for example?

It's even worse if, according to this, it's hard to use your bitcoins. Is it the same dilemma as using gold? I imagine if walk into a store with a tiny nugget of gold, they won't go out of their way to bring a scale to weigh it/an expert to ens

Gold's physical value is... well... mostly decorative. It does have uses but in such small quantities that they hardly figure compared to the jewellery market.

Why do people want shiny crystals and yellow metal? Same kind of questions. Same kind of answer: scarcity but demand. You can't find them lying around in the back garden, but equally other people want them (because THEY can't find them lying around in their back garden either).

Bitcoins aren't generated by raw processing power as such - it's a spe

Value is what people believe it to be. The US dollar is just as imaginary as bitcoin, the difference is there is an infrastructure in place to process it, whereas bitcoin is non-central. There are plenty of places you can exchange bitcoin, like gold, but issues like the one in the article do happen mostly because it's still in its infancy. Playing a mmorpg someone went off on how it's insane that in game gold has real value when it's imaginary, I pointed out that the in game economy of world of Warcraft alone exceeds that of Venezuela [foxnews.com]

If a 5.5% fee can't get a transaction complete in 2 days, how much does it cost?

I've never paid more than 3% extra for credit card transactions, 1.5 or 2% is more common. My bank gives me back 1% of that anyway. If the merchant absorbs that cost and distributes it across its credit card and cash customers, I effectively get a discount.

Yes. This is the fundamental problem. The only way crypto-currency gains traction is if the transaction fees and other "friction" drops below other convenient methods. This is probably why a lot of companies are developing private block chain systems and consortiums for special purposes so they can make the transaction fees essentially at cost (of operating their computing hardware)

Its still just a ton of speculation until some killer apps arrive. IMHO the real blockchain value is in the distributed cryptog

If a 5.5% fee can't get a transaction complete in 2 days, how much does it cost?

It's not related to the amount, but to getting your transaction included in a transaction block. Since they all take up the same space those who verify take the transactions with the biggest fee regardless of size. The idea was simply that you'd pay for faster processing though, not that it'd become a blocker to getting processed. But since Bitcoin has gone up more in value and is used for more transactions than designed, if you don't pay a big fee your turn never comes at all. I hear it's around $3 now, bu

The problem is that each block can only hold a finite number of transactions, so the miners will only carry those transactions that have the highest fees... Hence the scalability problem that's being talked about.

Like any other currency, it's worth what you can buy with it. Given the relatively illiquid level of commerce done in bitcoin, it's no wonder there is so much maniacal speculation over its value.

I once heard a currency expert on NPR remark that bitcoin is a collective hallucination we all share, that ascribes a value to an abstract entity. But he was quick to add that every currency is like that.

The idea of any blockchain-verified cryptocurrency being widely used as money never made sense, and never will. What, if I buy lunch for $10, I have to wait several hours or days for a bunch of server farms in China to verify my transaction while burning enough energy to light every house in my neighborhood? Either that, or pay $2 or $3 to get it "expedited" in 15 minutes?

It's insane. The world economy is far too large and complex to be funneled through 1 MB or 2 MB or 4 MB chunks of data verified one at a time, and even the people pushing BTC realize that now. When was the last time you heard BitPay brag about how many new merchants were using their service? The idea of BTC as money has all kind of faded away. It simply won't scale, regardless of the supposed "solution" of SegWit.

Now it's all about the speculative frenzy, and the different factions within the Bitcoin ecosystem fighting for control of the blockchain with hard forks. BTC is useful for moving large sums of currency across borders without government control (many wealthy Chinese like that), but as far as being used as "money", that ship has long sailed.

The idea of any blockchain-verified cryptocurrency being widely used as money never made sense, and never will. What, if I buy lunch for $10, I have to wait several hours or days for a bunch of server farms in China to verify my transaction while burning enough energy to light every house in my neighborhood? Either that, or pay $2 or $3 to get it "expedited" in 15 minutes?

It's insane. The world economy is far too large and complex to be funneled through 1 MB or 2 MB or 4 MB chunks of data verified one at a

We need to have a bank account with bitcoin that is not necessarily tied to a bitcoin wallet, that would just be bitcoin credit, similarly to what a fiat coin account would be. And then bitcoin credit card where a payment wouldn't require any movement of bitcoin from a wallet to the next and the financial institution could approve that purchase in bitcoin immediately.
And then, financial institutions would only need to do a bitcoin transaction once in a while in large batches and they wouldn't mind paying

Bitcoin suffers from it's own design. It's decentralized, and unregulated. Criminals have flocked to the 'currency' for these very reasons.

It just goes to show, regulation does have a place. I personally can't get behind something that facilitates criminality to the degree bitcoin does.

It's very design is the problem. It can't be regulated. Oversight is impossible. In the age of scams, fraud and identity theft, we simply cannot have a deregulated decentralized, pseudo-anonymous 'currency.' It just ca

Because scaling the transactions was becoming a problem. SegWit is supposed to allow for future development of the 'lighting network' which is supposed to allow thousands of transactions a second instead of just hundreds. Its a technological problem, for which there are multiple solutions. We'll just have to let the market work itself out.

I don't think transaction speeds are a technological problem. Bitcoin can do nothing to make transactions happen quickly at scale with any technological model with the way cryptocurrency is currently set up. It's a political problem that currently has no solution and worst yet as far as I know nobody has even come up with a pie in the sky solution that might work either.

Visa has to process millions of transactions every second. Visa spends a TON of money on data centers and ways to process all of that load. There is currently no good incentive for miners to create the massive infrastructure needed to make a real time transaction system work in the real world. It's either wait more than 5 minutes (unacceptable) or charge multi dollar fees on top of the price of what's being bought (also unacceptable). The only way Bitcoin will be viable is to work fast and cheap. It's neither.

You realize a lot of us just don't care about Bitcoin, right? It's just another commodity <yawn> There are millions of them in the market. What makes Bitcoin special? That it requires a energy expenditure that makes alt.pavers [wired.com] look like a model of efficiency?

There's little else interesting about Bitcoin.

There's certainly no envy: I put my money into the "traditional" stock and commodity market, and they have made more money for me than if I had used it for Bitcoin.

Then there's those of us who saw it the first time and thought "..gee, that's a great too for criminals to hide their illegal transactions, I'd be nuts to get involved in something like that!" and passed on the whole thing.

Businesses are reluctant to deal with Bitcoin because it's nothing but stable, transactions (confirmation times) are nothing but certain, there's this whiff of something which is used for illegal purposes to launder money and it's still largely unknown aside from those who read tech news. Over 95% of general population have no idea what Bitcoin is and how it can be used.

Second, "the fee is not evaluated relative to the transaction value. The fee is evaluated relative to the transaction size in bytes.
In o

Look, you BC guys want to have your little fantasies about "alt-currencies"? Go right ahead. Do NOT, however, think that BC will ever be any kind of true money (legal tender). It's 100% pure, organic, dolphin-free gambling. Sure, today, I can agree with a barber, say, to cut my hair in exchange for non-currency. It's known as barter. Barter, however, is even better in that there is something of value being exchanged. What's BC? Some algorithm generated on a Chinese server-farm. Woo-hoo! Suckers, apparently,

No one but distributors actually buys the products. The products exist to keep the pyramid just barely legal.

Bitcoins are only held by "distributors". They buy and sell them amongst themselves, driving the price ever higher. They have no more value than tulip bulbs did in the 1600s, and will end the same way, when people come to their senses.

The strength of Bitcoin comes from the health of the computers maintaining the Bitcoin network, and those computers are only on the network is because they're getting paid in bitcoin to maintain it.

Once it becomes hard to impossible to mine bitcoin, to the point where it is not financially feasible to do so, Bitcoin's network will weaken and fold as miners move onto the next crypto-currency with a better ROI.

This will have the net effect of weakening the number of systems maintaining bitcoin - and potentially weakening the strength of the bitcoin network. This *might* possibly cause bitcoin's price to suddenly drop as people pull out.

It's either that or bitcoin has to continue to inflate for eternity I guess.

Philosophical debate on reality aside, there is nothing less real about Bitcoin than other fiat currency.The design and process used to exchange BTC is probably deeply flawed, if these experiences are any indication. I can certainly whip out examples of currency systems through out history that were flawed in some way, and in many cases led to their eventual abandonment. I see no reason that we should assume that BTC will remain with us forever as an exchange medium, one day it will be a footnote in history and perhaps something similar but vastly improved will be available instead.

Philosophical debate on reality aside, there is nothing less real about Bitcoin than other fiat currency.

Sure there is. The US government has a law that says that businesses must accept US dollars. The fact that other people are legally required to accept it makes it "real money".

Now you can get all hypothetical and theoretical and say, "fiat money is always made up", but you said you wanted to put aside the philosophical debate on reality. Being very practical, there's not really anything to stop the value of bitcoin from dropping to zero tomorrow. There are a lot of things that will stop the value of the US dollar from dropping to zero tomorrow.

The US government has a law that says that businesses must accept US dollars.

What law? I do not believe there is a US federal law that requires private businesses or individuals to accept currency from the Federal Reserve Bank. We all choose to do so because it is incredibly convenient and there are many laws and statues that encourage it.

But as far as I know, I can choose to refuse cash money and only accept my payments in barter. (I mean if I really don't want to run a successful business)I will have to find some US currency to pay the tax man though, they quit accepting bushels of wheat as payment some long time ago.

The US government has a law that says that businesses must accept US dollars.

What law? I do not believe there is a US federal law that requires private businesses or individuals to accept currency from the Federal Reserve Bank. We all choose to do so because it is incredibly convenient and there are many laws and statues that encourage it.

You are correct [treasury.gov]. While it is legal tender for all debts, it is not a requirement to accept it. Furthermore, the word "debt" implies repayment. There is a difference between a straight-up trade (buying something at a register), receiving goods in advance (eating dinner, then paying the bill), and financing a debt (buying a car using a loan). There are nuances between those scenarios that affect legal requirements for payment, and furthermore, an additional consideration is payment in dollar equivalents such as using a credit card to purchase something using dollars, but not physical currency.

The long and short of it is you are correct, most transactions have no requirement to use U.S. dollars, but everyone does so anyway because nobody barters in livestock anymore.

When I was in college I managed a convenience store before there where atms everywhere and before bars took debit cards people would pump a little gas on Friday night and try to break a big bill. There where signs everywhere that we didn't keep large amounts of money on hand and wouldn't accept large bills to keep this from happening because if they already pumped the gas then you had no choice but to break the large bill.

Today you can pay at the pump with a debit or credit card as well as inside and atms a

There where signs everywhere that we didn't keep large amounts of money on hand and wouldn't accept large bills to keep this from happening because if they already pumped the gas then you had no choice but to break the large bill.

They have to accept the large bill don't have to provide change on the spot.

Heh. Depends where you live. Where I live bartering livestock for various goods and services is pretty common. I have a neighbor who just paid some number of cows to have a well drilled (to water his cattle).

In California, businesses (like restaurants) can refuse to accept money from anyone for any reason. They are not required to do business just because you have dollars or legal tender. If they don't like the fact that you are trying to pay in pennies, they don't have to accept it. Therefore, some business could legally refuse dollars but accept bitcoin if they wanted to.

Bank notes, from actual banks, that means both public or private banks, typically offer to pay the bearer. That Bank of England is a national bank doesn't mean only government supported banks have issued notes with t

Bragging about being the fifth richest nation is not really something to brag about.

Really? Because I read somewhere, that the fifth richest nation has an economy roughly about as big as California's. Fucking California's! That's not something to brag about? WTF planet are you on, where California's economy would be considered smallfry?

Oh yes there is. If you think a country's government and central banks don't have real power then you haven't been paying attention. The US dollar is backed by the US government and the US military. Start messing around with the US dollar and see how long it takes before you get sanctioned, invaded or both.

Oh yes there is. If you think a country's government and central banks don't have real power then you haven't been paying attention. The US dollar is backed by the US government and the US military. Start messing around with the US dollar and see how long it takes before you get sanctioned, invaded or both.

I live in that very country, and I don't find this reasoning very compelling.

The US dollar is a fiat currency. Suggesting that bitcoin is just as likely to be exchanged for its fiat value as a US dollar only denotes your utter lack to perceive reality. When bitcoin becomes the transactional currency of a top ten international bank, and yet be readily transacted at a street corner, and can trigger military invasions from other countries, that's when you can say bitcoin is as real as a US dollar.

The US Treasury has not produced a single fiat dollar, released to the public, which has not been transacted for its face value or declared counterfeit. By definition, a US dollar cannot be counterfeit. Entities outside of the US Treasury can create paper facsimiles for the purposes of theft, but that does not make the US dollar counterfeit. Bitcoin, on the other hand, has enabled perhaps millions of bitcoins "worth" of fraudulent transactions; it is not unique to fiat currency in that sense.

Can someone explain to me, because I honestly don't know, how one might take $1M worth of BTC and turn it into $1M USD (give or take)? Is it a simple transaction with some entity? Do you have to find a willing buyer? How does that work?

I get that there are exchanges. But that doesn't mean there are always buyers. So, if I had $1M of BTC, would I be likely to quickly find a buyer who would wire that much cash to my back account? Or would it be a slog with smaller buyers? I'm simply curious. How hard/likely is it to actually make that transaction happen?

With my current coinbase sell limits, it would take me ten weeks. That could be improved apparently, but I can't imagine how I could get to the point where that would matter. Alternatively, there are probably other major organizations that could absorb that level of transaction.

Philosophical debate on reality aside, there is nothing less real about Bitcoin than other fiat currency.

Men in suits, potentially with guns, can tax your income and/or transactions and require payment of those taxes in a fiat currency. Which means that at the end of the day that fiat currency is backed by the value of human labor and/or physical assets.

Bitcoin is backed only by demand for Bitcoin, and therefore can drop to absolute worthlessness on a whim, versus a complete collapse of governing authority.

Chose a shop at random. It will accept your USD/EUR/GBP/Whatever. Try to pay as bitcoin, watch them thinking you are insane. The lack of penetzration in shop make bitcoin solely a speculating commodity and not a currency. Facit : for 99+% of the population, the one who count, bitcoin do not exists.

the economic crisis of 2008, tarp, central bank stimulus by g7, etc. reminded the world that as flawed as they are, sovereign nation states that float fiat currency are still a backstop to a currency's floor and fundamentals. Not just a currency, I would say an institution. Sure there are multinational entities and pseudo-governments like the eu but my point is -- bitcoin being floated as an arbitrary currency will always be more fragile than something backed by a sovereign, because at least a sovereig

Bitcoin is not gold. Bitcoin requires knowledge of computers, a working network, and the willing participation of many people. Gold is gold. Go to some remote village in Africa and put a piece of paper on the ground with a bitcoin wallet code, and a gold nugget next to it. Guess which one gets picked up every time.

What does that prove? That gold is more useful in some context? That's an obvious given. What do you imagine you've proved here?

Not necessarily. A lot of stuff doesn't have to do with any real or perceived value. Prices can be driven by speculators speculating what other speculators will speculate.

That is, it's gamblers betting on what they think other gamblers will bet on, knowing that those other gamblers are also betting on what other gamblers will bet on. Even if they're pretty sure that Bitcoin is all hype and will eventually collapse, they're placing a bet that the bubble won't burst quite yet.

That's why larger investors have gotten more friendly with smaller investors in the 21st century. They realized they can make even more money if they blow the bubbles up big and stick a bunch of suckers with the dynamite just as the last bit of fuse burns down.

Problem with this kind of bubble is that at some point, they'll have to convert the BTC to USD or other currency for the price to drop. The price will drop when they will dump it, but dump it for what? You can buy nothing with BTC, and exchanges probably don't have enough of other currencies to back the BTC value.

I know that BTC is in a big bubble hype right now, but how can this bubble burst if you can't even dump it?

An asset is worth what you can sell it for, nothing more. As long as you can convert BTC to some government's currency, it's worth that amount. If there's a run out of BTC, and exchanges run out currency to exchange it for, the price of BTC collapses. At that point, the price lands at whatever speculators think they can low-ball purchase it for on the hope of a recovery.

There's enough gullible/greedy people in the world for that game to probably work a few times. Gi

That's part of the problem. Bitcoin is far from being any sort of common currency, so any merchant will be thinking about converting BTC back to USD or whatever other local currency. When BTC price fluctuates so much - why should I offer to sell you something today when I could make more USD by selling it to you tomorrow? Conversely why should I accept BTC from you today if I could lose money just due to BTC's daily price fluctuations. After all, I am not guaranteed to be able to cash out my BTC instantly - there's an arbitrary delay. If I'm a merchant and my profit margin is 10%, I'd be a fool to commit to a price in a currency that has been known to swing 30% or more during a single day. That is why BTC won't be mainstream until it stops being so volatile. And it will never stop being volatile because speculation is the only thing driving BTC.

Exactly. Bitcoin will never have the core feature of a desirable currency, which is stability. The only people who transact in volatile currencies are those who must -- namely the citizens of the countries that issue them. If you own BTC, there's little incentive to spend it because you likely believe it will be worth more of a "real" currency in the future, so you're holding it. If you believe it's going to depreciate, then you're probably going to liquidate by selling all of it, not by buying a pizza and paying transaction fees. And if you believe it's going to remain relatively stable, then I want some of what you're smoking.

The retail problem is easy to fix. Look as a building estimator I had unreasonable clients who would ask for massive penalties, for delays or work quality and so I would simply adjust the mark-up to allow for those penalties to occur. I would win the job and not be concerned for losses because those penalties were already allowed for, if they did not occur lots of profit, if the quote was to high and I did not win the job, meh, at least no risk of major losses (those clients were always arse holes so it was

Why would you get more money tomorrow? If the price of bitcoin relative to some currency goes up, I'd expect you to lower the amount of bitcoin you expect. The price should be set in USD, CAD, EUR, or some stable currency. The amount of bitcoin needed would have to be dynamically calculated.

Oh, so you admit that BTC has no real value because even you want to peg it to some other fiat currency. You just proved why BTC will never become a standard. Everyone is looking to see what BTC can get them in USD, GBP, EUR, JPY, etc and not BTC as a store of real value.

If people were planning on keeping BTC, everyone would be flocking to BTC to use it as a long term store of value and everyone would be thinking how many BTC their government issue fiat currency could buy them. After all, it has already been pointed out that BTC keeps gaining value. So only a fool would not want to store say their life savings in BTC. People don't though - why is that? Because they know that BTC's exponential growth is speculative only.

Funny I just bought stuff at the corner store and the checkout girl's eyes glazed over when I asked if I could pay in BTC. Then I ordered some delivery from a fast food joint and once again the dude on the phone said "what?" when I asked if I could pay in BTC. Some standard you have there.

Funny I just bought stuff at the corner store and the checkout girl's eyes glazed over when I asked if I could pay in American dollars. Then I ordered some delivery from a fast food joint and once again the dude on the phone said "what?" when I asked if I could pay in American dollars. Some standard you have there, which isn't even accepted in Europe.

Very few retail locations officially accept USD outside of the US. However, in almost all cases, you can talk them into taking it. They will usually penalize you though in terms of the exchange rate.
On the other hand, in the US, it does seem that people are oblivious to the fact that other currencies exist.

Well, money is anything that people agree is money. If you and I were to agree on M&Ms as a medium of exchange, that'd be money. If we agree to exchange goods for Monopoly money, that Monopoly money becomes real money.

The volatility of the value of Bitcoin is neither here nor there, other than it is an inconvenience for a currency. Bitcoin is a currency in which users are also speculators. Should I spend now, or hang on to see if the price goes up?

Money has three primary functions, a unit of account, a store of value and a medium of exchange. Your examples only function as a very limited medium of exchange, they do not provide a way to store value and they certainly can't be used sensibly as a unit of account. The volatility of Bitcoin is neither here nor there when using it as a medium of exchange, but it is most definitely a relevant consideration if you are using it as a store of value or unit of account. Here's a little primer on what money actually is: https://www.boundless.com/busi... [boundless.com]

Assume I have 100 bitcoins and I want to buy a computer which costs 100 bitcoins now.

It's a very simplistic example, innit? Bitcoin has had an upward trajectory of late, but it's been a very volatile upward trajectory, and was preceded by an extended downturn in the value of BTC. History, then, does not support your example, as nobody really knows how the market will behave tomorrow.